For food and beverage manufacturers, product quality isn’t just another checkbox on a long list of priorities. It’s a whole discipline by itself. In fact, if it’s not the main focus of your business, you probably won’t stay in business.
Dominion Liquid Technologies (DLT) knows the importance of focusing on quality. This private label manufacturer of coffee and pancake syrups, cocktail mixes, and energy drinks recently set out to automate its quality processes and gain more control over production. DLT achieved both of these objectives by moving its core business processes to a cloud ERP platform.
Here are three quality-related issues DLT addressed with cloud ERP.
Issue #1: Balancing Growth and Quality
DLT began its life by acquiring another company. But DLT’s executives knew that for growth to continue, everyone on the DLT team would have to be laser-focused on product excellence. This meant DLT needed to manage its quality and traceability data with something more sophisticated than manual processes and paper-based systems.
Like most process manufacturers, DLT’s customers hold the company to stringent quality targets. But when DLT ran its business on manual processes, it experienced too many costly batching errors. And because different teams within the manufacturing process worked in silos, it was difficult for anyone to track inventory levels and expiration dates. As a result, DLT experienced high levels of excess and obsolete inventory—another threat to long-term growth.
Cloud ERP gave DLT the visibility to address these problems. With real-time tracking of all inventory assets—including raw materials, work in process (WIP), and finished products—DLT has achieved near 100 percent inventory accuracy. This information has empowered the company to reduce excess inventory and its associate carrying costs.
Meanwhile, cloud ERP gave DLT the batch production functionality to increase the accuracy of its batch scaling operation and boost inventory traceability. Executives also have real-time visibility into where costs are accruing so that they can make decisions that keep the company profitable as it grows.
Issue #2: Preparing for (and Preventing) Recalls
It’s every food manufacturer’s worst nightmare: a product recall that not only results in thousands of dollars of wasted materials, but also damages the company’s reputation for years to come. As DLT grew, its executives realized the company needed to be better prepared to respond to recalls or food safety alerts. With too much information living in silos, DLT didn’t have the detailed data it needed to contain exposure in the event of a product defect.
DLT’s cloud ERP platform gave the company the accurate data it needed to trace materials and products from the supplier to the customer. High-resolution track and trace capabilities give DLT visibility into any material move or production event from one up and one back. As a result, DLT now has the tools and information to respond quickly in the unlikely event of a recall.
Issue #3: Ensuring Repeatable Quality Control
A quality control process isn’t really a process at all if it’s not repeatable. DLT knew that by relying on manual, paper-based quality processes, it was leaving itself vulnerable to human and mechanical error.
With cloud ERP, DLT has improved its quality processes with integral—rather than integrated—quality management that enforces proper procedures. An intuitive control panel connects operators with all the data they need while delivering production performance data to the business in real time. The system also enforces completion of checksheets based on customer quality specifications. If a product doesn’t comply, production stops until errors are addressed.
Call it “error-proof production management.” In a recent annual food safety and quality certification audit by the Safe Quality Food Institute, DLT scored a 98 out of 100.
Get the Full Story About Product Quality
With cloud ERP, DLT digitized its quality control processes, enabling the company to capture, measure, and reduce its risk of product recall. The results? Greater operational advantage—and better margins.
Get the full story. Watch the webinar “How Cloud ERP Drives Rapid Growth” to learn more about the benefits DLT achieved with cloud ERP.
